


The [Insert Scary Noun Here]:  or How to Find Yourself Trying to Kill Tony Stark at Disneyland...

by rabidsamfan



Category: Marvel, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, the bad guy's point of view
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 10:21:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14258892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabidsamfan/pseuds/rabidsamfan
Summary: Life isn't easy when superheroes have taken all the good code names.





	The [Insert Scary Noun Here]:  or How to Find Yourself Trying to Kill Tony Stark at Disneyland...

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Izzyland](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14258631) by [copperbadge](https://archiveofourown.org/users/copperbadge/pseuds/copperbadge). 



> Copperbadge wrote me a story for Stony Trumps Hate, and very kindly let me read it early. And having read it I had headcanons, which he very kindly indulged. So I'm sharing.

The thing, Mortimer Slaughter the Third knew, was that no one would ever take an assassin called Mortimer Slaughter the Third seriously. For that matter, no one had taken a fifth grader called Mortimer Slaughter the Third seriously once they realized third rhymed with turd and things had only gotten worse since then. 

In seventh grade he had wanted to be called “The Spider Boy”, because he was good at climbing stuff. So good, in fact, that he’d discovered that most people didn’t lock their windows on the second floor. Or notice when little stuff went missing. Most people. But the stint in Juvie had been good for finding out where to sell things without getting caught the next time. He’d tried calling himself “The Tarantula,” but it never stuck past anyone hearing his full name. 

By tenth grade he’d only shown up at school because of the free lunch and the computer lab. Most of the time he spent hanging around with some of the guys from Juvie, shooting at shit up in the hills above LA and smoking weed. He kept hoping to get asked to do something because he was tough, and not because he was skinny and short enough to get into places where guys with actual muscle couldn’t. He wanted to pull elaborate heists like he saw in the movies, but he didn’t have any idea how to get the tech gear to pull it off. Still, raiding empty houses and half finished developments for copper pipes to sell on the black market had paid good. Good enough to stay in California and pretend to finish school when his parents decided that the grass was greener on the other side of the border. 

For a while everything went great. He would do a job, and then hang out on internet forums and try hacking tricks until he ran out of beer or weed. (On the internet, he was “The Gecko” for a while, but that only lasted until he actually saw a gecko and realized how small they were.) Then somebody ratted out the guy he’d been selling pipes to, and next thing Mortimer knew he’d found himself tried, convicted, and on a bus to the prison in Chuckawalla Valley.

Prison had not been as good as Juvie. He’d fainted four pinpricks into his tattoo. (It was supposed to say “The Honey Badger”, but he’d had to give up after “The Hon” and pretend the tattoo artist had misspelled it.) And the ventilation shafts had been designed by people who really didn’t want anyone in the ventilation shafts. It was all he could do to just stay under the radar for five years. He’d almost decided to go straight and get a real job once he was out when he’d been shifted into a different cellblock and found himself in a cell with the Engineer.

Who really really _really_ wanted to kill Tony Stark. 

And that had changed everything. 

Because for the first time, someone heard the name “Mortimer Slaughter”, and assumed that it wasn’t just a name. It was his _destiny._


End file.
